I am a MA/MBA candidate at the Lauder Institute and the Wharton School of Business. I focus on Russian politics, economics, and demography but also write more generally about Eastern Europe. Please note that all opinions expressed here are mine and mine alone and that I do not speak in an official capacity for Lauder, Wharton, Forbes, or any other organization.
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The Moscow Riot And Russian Nationalism: It's Time To Start Worrying

I’m usually more optimistic than most Westerners when it comes to Russia. This is not because I’m enamored with Russia’s current political institutions, but primarily because I write a lot about seemingly dry and boring topics, like health and demography, where things have improved quite substantially over the past thirteen years. In terms of its population trends, Russia’s actual performance since 2000 has consistently exceeded even the rosiest predictions. In other words, it’s usually difficult for me to square the virtually universal pessimism about the country with rapid improvement in basic indicators like life expectancy and fertility.

But there are obviously dark sides to contemporary Russia, and the problems associated with mass migration (and the nationalist backlash that it has inspired) are close to the top of the list. These tensions exploded yesterday in Biryulyovo, a working class district in southern Moscow. As reported by CBS:

The stabbing death of an ethnic Russian man has ignited anger in Moscow against people from the Caucasus, with demonstrators breaking into a shopping center and storming a vegetable warehouse Sunday evening. Police detained hundreds of people.

The man was believed to have been killed by a native of the North Caucasus, a region in southern Russia where the people are predominantly Muslim. Caucasus natives work in the shopping center and at many vegetable markets around the Russian capital.

Even if you don’t speak Russian I would highly recommend watching the following video, which gives a pretty good sense of the pandemonium that transpired and of the undistilled, inchoate rage of the demonstrators. As of Monday morning it appears that “calm” has been restored after a show of force by that police that, even by Russian standards, was massive and heavy-handed and the rioting does not seem to have spread to any other regions of Moscow or any other cities within Russia. Miraculously no one was killed, but dozens were injured and hundreds were arrested. It was a dangerous and ugly spectacle.

What is most disconcerting, though, is not the riot itself but the ethnic nationalist passions that inspired it. Rioting is obviously bad, but Moscow will be able to survive with one fewer vegetable market and, in retrospect the security forces were actually able to disperse the crowd in fairly short order. What happened in Biryulovo, in other words, was pretty clearly not a Tahrir Square moment that will rapidly escalate into a nationwide popular mobilization.

But the passions that motivated the people in Biryulovo, hatred and fear of central Asians and people from the Caucasus, appear to be gaining ever greater traction in Russian society. They also appear to be gaining ever greater acceptance among the anti-Putin opposition. Alexey Navalny, by far the most prominent and popular member of the anti-Putin movement, wasted no time in responding to the events in Biryulovo. Writing on his LiveJournal blog, Navalny laid the blame for the riots on a virtually endless list of people and institutions: the police, the courts, the interior ministry, the FSB, the Kremlin, the migrants, corrupt bureaucrats, oligarchs, and Vladimir Putin himself.

A curious omission from Navalny’s list of the guilty was the one group that would have been the most obvious inclusion: the rioters. In Navalny’s narrative riots like that in Biryulovo just sort of happen. No particular person or group of people is to blame, violent disturbances are just the inevitable results of Russia’s corrupt and ineffective state institutions.

Navalny never explicitly endorses the riots, you see, because he’s far too clever to do such a thing. Explicitly supporting a riot would not only expose him to criminal prosecution, but would weaken his political brand among the sophisticated and internet-savvy denizens of Russia’s large cities. Navalny, in the words of NYU professor Mark Galeotti, is engaging in a form of “cheap and nasty populism,” a stance that, with a wink and a nod, acknowledges all of the grievances of the nationalists while remaining studiously silent on their tactics.

While this is entirely Navalny’s decision to make (and while Russians should be free to express any political views they desire) it seems clear to me that the goals of the liberals and the nationalists are starkly divergent. Liberalism, at its best, is about encouraging the free flow of people, goods, and ideas, about establishing clear rules of the game that apply equally to all citizens regardless of their religion, sex, or ethnicity. And so a truly “liberal” Russia would welcome the influx of “migrants”* from the Caucasus because they play important roles in economic sectors that ethnic Russians traditionally eschew. Comparative advantage, and that sort of thing.

A nationalist policy, in contrast, would seek to preserve “Russia for the Russians.” It would be, of necessity, a less inclusive society because identity was being constructed on an immutable, ethnic basis. A nationalist Russia would be more paranoid and insecure, a country that was constantly fretting about the “dangers” posed by outsiders. It would be less economically dynamic, and more focused on the preservation of stability.

I’d very much like to see a more liberal Russia, a Russia that is genuinely open to new people, ideas, and goods. Perhaps I’m just small minded and unoriginal, but I simply cannot imagine how a more liberal Russia will emerge from the cynical and instrumental use of ethnic nationalism. Nationalism is almost always a deeply reactionary force, and I think that Russian liberals are making an enormous mistake in trying to exploit it because it’s not something that they control. Once you let the nationalist genie out of the bottle, there’s no way of cramming it back in.

And so that’s what’s truly scary about Biryulovo. Not the violence itself, but the ways in which the non-systemic opposition looks at that violence and sees not an unjustifiable attempt at collective punishment, but an excellent opportunity to weaken the state. That’s a perfectly understandable strategy, but one that’s likely to end in tears.

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There is no denying that Russia suffers from wide spread xenophobia and homophobia. More generally, Russia today is haunted by deeds that have not been examined and words that have been left unsaid. A serious attempt to understand the meaning of the Communist experience has not been undertaken, and millions of victims of Soviet Communism are all but forgotten. All patriotic Russians should read David Satter’s It Was a Long Time Ago and It Never Happened Anyway, which fantastically describes Russia’s great historical tragedy, locating its source in Russia’s failure fully to appreciate the value of the individual in comparison with the objectives of the state.

@nirvichara: Adomanis can’t read your anti Semitic rant in Russian but I can. You lack logic. There is no more reason to blame all Jews for the perceived failings of one of them than to blame all Russians for stupidity or criminality of say, one Russian Nazi collaborator. However, in your case, it is a moral issue as well, so I would classify anti Semitic cockroaches like you as having swastika instead of a brain and you are just as Russian as Demyanyuk. On the other hand, I totally agree with the sentiments of the Biryulevo rioters, this not nationalism, but justifiable indignation at the criminal Caucasus scum which infested Moscow.